A Consultant Offered to Erase the Company's Record. The Decision Was Never Theirs to Sell.

The proposal arrives as a spreadsheet.

Each row is something bad that happened to the company. A judgment. An enforcement record. A tax arrears notice. An old administrative penalty. A news article somebody wrote three years ago.

Every row carries the same unit price.

At the bottom, in bold: no result, no fee.

It reads like a quotation from a contractor, priced by the square meter. What is being quoted is not work. It is the disappearance of a legal status.

Any company in China that has had a hard two or three years eventually receives a version of this document. It usually arrives when the company is trying to do something specific — bid for a contract, qualify as a supplier, renew a license, close a financing — and has just discovered that a counterparty ran a search and did not like what came back. The offer lands at exactly the moment the buyer is least inclined to ask how it works.

So it is worth asking now, in advance, when there is nothing at stake.

The question is not whether a negative record can disappear. Some records do, and the law says so. The question is who controls that disappearance, and who answers for it afterward.

The short answer: much of what appears on that spreadsheet cannot lawfully be purchased, because the removal decision belongs to the authority that created the record and is made on grounds that authority defines. Some entries will lapse on a schedule fixed by regulation. Some the company can clear by applying, at no cost, through a government website — with professional help if it wants it, which is lawful and often sensible. Some cannot move until the company performs the underlying obligation. And in every case where an application is filed, the document that carries it is signed by the company. That last point decides how much this whole decision matters.

Four Systems, Not One Database

The premise of the spreadsheet is that a company has a single reputation stored somewhere, and that reputation has a delete key. That is not how the information is held.

What a search engine or a commercial company-information platform shows about a Chinese company is an aggregation of records generated by different authorities under different rules. They are not one system. They do not share a removal procedure. Understanding which record sits where is most of the analysis.

Public credit information — administrative penalties, abnormal operation listings, serious dishonesty listings — is governed by the Measures for the Administration of Credit Repair (National Development and Reform Commission Order No. 36 of 2025, effective April 1, 2026), which replaced the trial measures issued in 2023. Credit repair here is a defined administrative act: after the company has corrected the conduct and performed its obligations, the authority terminates publication of the record, stops sharing it, and lifts the associated disciplinary measures (Article 3). It is a right, not a favor (Article 2).

The Measures classify negative information as minor, general or serious, and attach a publication period to each class. Minor information is generally not published at all; general information runs a minimum of three months and a maximum of one year; serious information a minimum of one year and a maximum of three (Article 12). Two consequences follow, and they cut in opposite directions. Before the minimum period expires, nobody can shorten it. After the maximum period expires, publication stops automatically, whether or not anyone applies.

Applications go through a single intake window, the Credit China website, and are routed to whichever authority made the determination in the first place (Article 13). The company must meet four conditions: the minimum publication period has run, the conduct has been corrected and the obligations fully performed, a public credit undertaking has been given, and any further statutory conditions are satisfied (Article 14). It supplies two things — evidence of performance and the signed undertaking (Article 15) — and the deciding authority works to fixed short deadlines (Article 16).

The process itself costs nothing. Article 26 prohibits the operating institution from charging the applicant a fee in any form, directly or indirectly.

Court records are not in this system. Judgments published online are governed by the Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on the Publication of Judgments on the Internet by People's Courts (Fa Shi [2016] No. 19, effective October 1, 2016). A published judgment is withdrawn where the published version does not match the original or was incorrectly redacted, or where it falls into one of the categories that should not have been published at all (Article 16, read with Article 4). Those categories include a residual discretion — documents the court considers unsuitable for internet publication (Article 4(5)) — but it is exercised on the handling judge's written opinion, reviewed within the court and approved by the vice president in charge (Article 12). It is a judicial decision about the court's own publication, not a remedy a party applies for. Nothing in the Provisions treats the losing party's subsequent improvement as a ground for withdrawal.

Listing as a dishonest judgment debtor is governed by the Several Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on the Publication of Information on the List of Dishonest Judgment Debtors (2013, as amended, effective May 1, 2017). The listing is removed where the debtor has performed the obligations in the judgment, where a settlement has been reached and performed, where the applicant consents in writing, or where the court has twice searched and found no executable property (Article 10); and it is revoked outright where the party should never have been listed (Article 9). Every one of those grounds is an event in the enforcement proceeding.

Tax arrears announcements exist because the tax authority is required to publish them periodically under the PRC Law on the Administration of Tax Collection (2015 Amendment), Article 45, paragraph 3. The announcement reflects unpaid tax. It comes down when the tax is paid.

Commercial platforms are the last layer, and the one counterparties actually look at. These are private databases that ingest official records and resell them in a friendlier interface. Under Article 24 of the Measures, third-party credit service agencies drawing information from Credit China must maintain an update mechanism and stay consistent with it; where the two differ, the official record prevails, and the operating institution can suspend sharing with an agency that fails to update. Once the official record is repaired, the commercial platform is under a regulatory duty to follow, at no cost and without the company doing anything further.

Where the Line Actually Falls

None of this means that paid outside help is improper. The distinction matters, and it is finer than the market's own marketing suggests.

There is real professional work on this terrain. Deciding whether a penalty should be challenged by administrative reconsideration or litigation, bearing in mind that publication is not suspended while those proceedings run (Article 19 of the Measures). Assembling proof of full performance. Drafting the credit undertaking so that it says only what the company can stand behind. Negotiating an enforcement settlement the creditor will confirm as performed, which is what actually clears a dishonest-debtor listing. Calculating the earliest date an application may be filed at all. Suing a publisher where an article is genuinely defamatory or otherwise unlawful. Those engagements are lawful, priced by the procedure involved, and end in a filing, a hearing or a settlement that leaves a record.

What sits on the other side is a promise that the record itself will be gone, offered without reference to which body decides or on what ground. The test is not whether money changes hands. It is whether the work is directed at the body with the power to decide, or at the display.

The Price Per Record Tells You Which One You Are Buying

That test is easier to apply than it sounds, and the pricing usually applies it for you.

A tax arrears announcement requires payment of the tax. A dishonest debtor listing requires performance the creditor confirms. An administrative penalty requires full performance plus expiry of a publication period that may be three months or three years depending on classification. A published judgment, in the ordinary case, has no party-driven route at all.

Those are not comparable pieces of work, and they cannot rationally carry the same price, because the variable that determines the outcome is not effort. It is whether a legal ground exists.

So a flat per-record fee applied uniformly across judgments, enforcement records, tax notices, penalties and news items is not an aggressive commercial rate. Uniform pricing implies fungible items, and these items are only fungible if the target is a database display rather than the state record behind it. A price list that ignores the deciding authority is describing work that does not involve it.

Two related features point the same way. Success-based pricing is difficult to reconcile with an application process whose outcome turns on a statutory waiting period and a formal document review. And where the number of records to be processed is taken from what a commercial platform displays rather than from the official register, the deliverable has already been defined by reference to a private database.

What Happens When the Records Do Come Down

Some of these engagements deliver. That is the case worth thinking about, because it is the case in which the buyer has a problem rather than a disappointment.

The Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Defamation and Other Offenses Committed Through Information Networks (Fa Shi [2013] No. 21, effective September 10, 2013) addresses this directly. Article 7 provides that a person who, in violation of state regulations and for profit, provides paid information-deletion services through an information network commits illegal business operation under Article 225(4) of the PRC Criminal Law once the specified thresholds are met. Article 8 treats a person who knowingly supplies funding, premises or technical support to someone committing that offense as an accomplice.

Read from the buyer's side, the provision does not make payment itself an offense. Funding is expressly among the forms of assistance it reaches, and knowledge is the element that decides the outcome — which is why what the company understood about the method, and what it chose not to ask, becomes the operative fact rather than a matter of atmosphere.

I would be cautious about the assumption, common among general counsel who inherit one of these engagements, that the company is insulated because the contract describes the service as consulting, information screening or data analysis. Characterization in a services agreement does not control the criminal analysis, and an invoice describing deletion work as consulting creates a separate problem in the company's own accounts and tax position.

The Undertaking Is Signed by the Company

The criminal exposure is the dramatic risk. The one I see catch companies more often is quieter, and it operates even where the engagement is lawful in form.

Where an agent files a credit repair application, the document at the center of it is the public credit undertaking required by Article 14(3) of the Measures: a statement that the materials submitted are true and valid and that the applicant accepts responsibility for breach. It is given by the credit subject. The agent does not give it.

Article 25 sets out the consequence if it proves false, or if the authority determines that the undertaking was deliberately not performed. The record of that finding is published on Credit China for three years and cannot be terminated early; the original negative information cannot be repaired for three years; and criminal liability follows where the conduct amounts to a crime.

Now consider the incentives on each side of that filing. An agent paid per record, working on contingency, holding no professional license and bearing no filing responsibility, has every reason to describe performance generously in a document submitted under someone else's name. The company has every reason to want that description tested before it goes in, and usually no process for doing so, because the engagement was procured as a purchase rather than as legal work.

That gap is a governance problem, not a vendor problem. Three questions decide it, and all three sit inside the company: who is authorized to make a representation to a regulator in the company's name; who verifies the underlying performance before that representation is signed; and who owns the underlying legal event — the unpaid tax, the unperformed judgment, the penalty obligation — that the representation is about. A company that cannot answer them is exposed whether or not it ever buys the spreadsheet.

Where Foreign Counsel Misread the Problem

Foreign counsel familiar with consumer credit-repair concepts in their own markets sometimes map the Chinese issue onto a regulatory model that does not fit, and the mismatch shows up in two places.

The first is what is being repaired. Credit repair in China operates on public credit information held by government platforms and is delivered by the state at no charge. The financial credit reporting system run by the central bank is a separate database with its own rules, and accurate adverse entries in it are not subject to a repair procedure at all.

The second is where the leverage sits, and this is the point most consistently underestimated. The strongest instrument in the current Measures is not commercial. Article 20 allows a company in reorganization or composition, or its administrator, to apply on the strength of the court ruling approving the plan or confirming the settlement — and requires the authority to shield the negative information temporarily, on a minimum-necessary basis, and to lift restrictions that would obstruct performance of the plan, with full repair available once performance is confirmed. If performance fails, the original publication is restored. Where the company's difficulty is genuinely legacy rather than live, the instrument that moves the record is a court order obtained in a formal proceeding.

The planning point: before responding to one of these proposals, inventory the records by deciding authority rather than by count. For each one, identify the event that would lawfully remove it and the earliest permitted application date. In most cases the exercise resolves into three lists — records that will lapse on their own, records the company can clear by performing an obligation it owes anyway, and records that are part of the company's history and will stay there. A proposal that promises results outside those three categories should be asked, in writing, which authority it expects to decide and on what ground.

Practitioner's Note

The instinct behind these purchases is understandable. A company that has fixed its problems does not want to keep being judged by the worst period in its history, and search results can feel like an injustice that money ought to be able to correct.

But a public record in China is not a reputational artifact sitting loose on a website. It is the published trace of a legal event, held by the body that determined it, removable on grounds that body defines, on a clock that regulation sets. Professional help with that process is worth paying for. What is not available for purchase is the decision itself.

Which leaves management with a narrower question than the one the spreadsheet invites. Not who can make the record disappear, but whether the company has resolved the legal event that produced it — and whether anyone inside the company is willing to sign, in the company's own name, that it has.

Legal authorities

• Measures for the Administration of Credit Repair (National Development and Reform Commission Order No. 36 of 2025, effective April 1, 2026), Articles 2, 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26
• Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on the Publication of Judgments on the Internet by People's Courts (Fa Shi [2016] No. 19, effective October 1, 2016), Articles 4, 12 and 16
• Several Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on the Publication of Information on the List of Dishonest Judgment Debtors (2013, as amended, effective May 1, 2017), Articles 9 and 10
• Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Defamation and Other Offenses Committed Through Information Networks (Fa Shi [2013] No. 21, effective September 10, 2013), Articles 7 and 8
• PRC Criminal Law, Article 225(4)
• PRC Law on the Administration of Tax Collection (2015 Amendment), Article 45, paragraph 3

Key takeaways

• Repair of public credit information is free by regulation, and no fee may be charged to the applicant in any form.
• Lawful professional assistance exists and is worth buying; it is directed at the deciding authority, and it is priced by procedure rather than by record count.
• Court judgments, enforcement listings and tax arrears announcements respond only to events in the underlying proceeding, not to a repair application.
• Commercial company-information platforms are required to follow the official record once it is repaired.
• The credit undertaking is signed by the company, and the three-year consequence for a false undertaking falls on the company rather than on its agent.

Related Reading

• Someone Used Your Company's Name to Commit Fraud. You Are Not the Victim. — on what happens when a public record reflects something the company did not do.
• A Lawyer Helped His Client Open a Bank Account. It Cost Him His License and Nine Months in Prison. — on how criminal liability reaches the adviser as well as the party in an enforcement matter.

More on this area of practice: Commercial Disputes.

---

This article discusses general principles of PRC law and is not legal advice on any particular matter.

Last reviewed: August 7, 2026